technology
Recently, during a birthday celebration for a friend at Eleven Madison Park, we were invited to see the kitchen of what is, arguably, one of New York’s best restaurants; the number of staff on any given day roughly equals the number of diners – THAT’S how attentive the service and complex the menu. While cooks in crisp white toques worked with great concentration around us, we were treated to some culinary sleight-of-hand in honor of our friend.
Using liquid nitrogen, a chef made us a molecular gastronomy version of the classic Manhattan cocktail. read more…
08.16.11 |
comments (3) |
in inspiration, kitchen, paths + processes, people, quotes, signs, technology |
We laughed out loud at this week’s New Yorker’s Shouts & Murmur’s page by Paul Simms. It envisions God blogging the newly-created earth. God writes:
UPDATE: Pretty pleased with what I’ve come up with in just six days. Going to take tomorrow off. Feel free to check out what I’ve done so far. Suggestions and criticism (constructive, please!) more than welcome. God out.
And then God starts getting Comments, twenty-four of them. Our favorites:
Unfocussed. Seems like a mishmash at best. You’ve got creatures that can speak but aren’t smart (parrots). Then, You’ve got creatures that are smart but can’t speak (dolphins, dogs, houseflies). Then, You’ve got man, who is smart and can speak but who can’t fly, breathe underwater, or unhinge his jaws to swallow large prey in one gulp. If it’s supposed to be chaos, then mission accomplished. But it seems more like laziness and bad planning. read more…
08.04.11 |
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in inspiration books + zines, nature, outside, paths + processes, technology |
All Posts
Recently, we came a cross an old hard drive that we had swapped out of a computer long ago; who knows what revealing bits of information were on it? We searched the internet to learn how to dispose of a hard drive without leaving ourselves open to industrious hackers. We could either wipe it clean by ways that were way beyond our competence or…DESTROY IT. A friend of ours took it onto the street and smashed it to bits on the sidewalk using a $9 hammer we’d bought on Amazon. She returned with the twisted wreck, which had become was curiously beautiful…an inadvertent sculpture. read more…
07.26.11 |
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in how-to, reclaim, resources, services, technology |
Stuart Williams
Our neighbor Stuart Williams, who lives down the hall from us, sent us a holiday e-card that he designed : a great example of swell d-i-y greetings makable with design, drawing, or photo software. Use photos or graphics to design your PDF and SEND IT OUT via email, to say HELLO to lots of folks easily.
Stuart’s card also reminded us about the connectivity of ideas that happens in an apartment building or a neighborhood, when folks start talking to each other and asking “What are you up to these days?” On elevator rides in our building, we’ve gotten make-up lessons from a professional make-up artist, and learned about the Secrets of Paris Department Stores. We became friends with Couturier de Cardboard Matthew Sporzynski, and the recipient of his stealth gift-giving.
Stopping to chat one day, we discovered that our neighbor Stuart is a site-specific, environmental artist. He created the Luminous Earth Grid, a vast array of 1,680 fluorescent lamps, which swept over the undulating landscape north of San Francisco (in an expanse equal to eight football fields), like an immense electrified quilt: read more…
12.21.10 |
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in art, cheap + great, community, family + friends, materials, share, sightings, technology |
We been slow in adding essential information to the ‘the improvised life’s homepage (that will be there permanently one day): that we we’re tweeting the great quick improvisations we find, like this unbelievably beautiful Bauhaus cloth print designed on a typewriter, and this fabulous ‘do’ from Alexander McQueen read more…
12.07.10 |
comments (1) |
in community, sightings, technology, tools |
About a week ago, in our post about treadmill desks, we were bemoaning (and marveling at) the concerted ugliness of treadmill design, wondering how we could ever improvise a desk that would be pleasing to look at. Then we stumbled on Core 77′s amazing in-depth post of attempts to rethink the treadmill (with tons of photos, including bedrooms blighted by dreary gunmetal gray exercise machines).
Our favorite (though untested) is the Nautilus Mobia, which can work as a stair-master or a treadmill, or a sort of elliptical-style combo of the two. It looks GOOD and we’re thinking that its counter-like design might night need much of a hack to work at it…
Related post: why not?: d-i-y treadmill desk
11.04.10 |
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in elements, inside, solutions, technology, tools |
Sometimes we are just completely knocked out by the connections of ideas and people we make daily writing ‘the improvised life’. Like Matthew Levesque, a reader from San Francisco who runs Building Resources, a not-for-profit depot of re-usable and re-manufactured materials for building and landscaping….
…who wrote a book we want called: The Revolutionary Yardscape: Ideas for Repurposing Local Materials to Create Containers, Pathways, Lighting, and More
…
….whose comment on our post about “The Mother of All Task Lights” called our attention to…
a) a wonderful Achille Castiglione lamp that is hidden in the photo
b) and the EXTRAORDINARY website and work of the Campana Brothers, the Brazilian design team. Their website needs Flash to run and will try your computer’s resources. And once you enter, it will eat at least a half hour of your time, a fabulous example of what’s possible in a website. Somehow, in the oddest ways possible, the Campanas give you a sense of the process/origins of their furniture and housewares. On the main page, click Projects, and then click on the project you want to see. Prepared to be surprised…
Our favorites: read more…
10.25.10 |
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in community, inspiration blogs + sites, materials, media, outside, reclaim, resources books + zines, stores, technology |
“The World Is Full of Interesting Things“, an online slideshow created by Google’s Creative Labs, gives you a compelling glimpse of the imaginative ways technology and the internet are being used (much of it in collaboration with Google technology). There are revelations in the realms of Audio, Movies, Vizual, Art, Physical, Light, Tech, Sport, Books, History and Advertising. The Advertising section that starts at #110 is a must for anyone trying to get a sense of crowd-sourcing and commercial uses for social media.
For us, the best stuff started a good ways into the show (at the bottom, left of the site, there’s a navigator that will take you to any of the 119 slides). Here are some of our favorites: read more…
10.13.10 |
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in community, inspiration blogs + sites, media, resources, resources blogs + sites, technology |
Internet visionary Kevin Kelly homeschooled his 8th grade son for a year and wrote about it recently for The New York Times Magazine. He tried to teach his son the kind of tools that would help him navigate the pace of technology which is accelerating so fast “his eventual adult career does not exist yet. Of course it won’t be taught in school.” Kelly believes we all need “technological literacy…proficiency with the larger system of our invented world. It is close to an intuitive sense of how you add up, or parse, the manufactured realm. We don’t need expertise with every invention; that is not only impossible, it’s not very useful. Rather, we need to be literate in the complexities of technology in general, as if it were a second nature.”
As usual with Kelly’s writing, he cuts through to the heart of the matter, and offers tools and a mindset for navigating the tricky terrain that affects us all: read more…
10.07.10 |
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in learn, resources, strategies, technology, tools |
